Apollo-era NASA officials say climate change research ‘corrupted’ by politics and special interests

About a year ago four dozen former NASA astronauts, engineers and scientists penned a public letter admonishing the space agency for taking a high-profile stance on climate change.

Now under the rubric The Right Climate Stuff a group that includes some of the same members — although exactly who the membership of this group consists of has not been disclosed — has taken the issue a step further.

Our main objective of determining to what extent CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere can cause detrimental global warming has led us to an objective conclusion that this issue is not settled science. Unfortunately, the scientific progress on this issue has been corrupted by political and special interest influences that determine where our research dollars get spent. Political influences in government sponsored research have focused climate change research on CO2 rather than a broader range of factors that need better definition.

With regard to the report I will reiterate what I wrote a year ago. That these men and women are skeptical about human-caused climate change is not surprising. I know a number of them and have interviewed several of them during the last five years in which I have covered NASA. Many, such as Walt Cunningham, Larry Bell and Harrison Schmitt, are well known skeptics.

What these men and women are not is climate scientists. Most are not even scientists in the sense that they have pursued scientific research during their careers, in any discipline.

The right stuff?

What these men and women are, however, are heroes. They are the space program’s greatest generation, which built the spacecraft that landed on the moon, first ventured into the heavens and laid the groundwork for the space shuttle and International Space Station programs. Many of them are also deeply unsatisfied with the current state of human spaceflight.

But this, again, does not make them experts in the field of climate change.

They are correct to raise the issue that there are unsettled areas in climate change.

It is true that there is vigorous debate in the scientific community about how significant warming will be in the coming century, but there is almost no disagreement among climate scientists that the planet is, and will continue to warm due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. A recent study of warming by previously skeptical scientists, in fact, found that the planet has continued to warm in accordance with scientific predictions.

The bottom line for me is that I wouldn’t ask a climate scientist to launch me into space, and I wouldn’t ask a rocket scientist to program the dynamical core of a global circulation model.